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Comic Book Legends Revealed #500 (Part 1)

Welcome to the five hundredth in a series of examinations of comic book legends and whether they are true or false. Click here for an archive of the previous four hundred and ninety-nine. This week, in honor of the five hundredth edition of Comic Book Legends Revealed, you'll get a TRIPLE-sized column this week, in three parts (today, tomorrow and Sunday). The special theme this week is comic book anniversaries, as each part will spotlight a different superhero celebrating an anniversary this year. Today is Wolverine, tomorrow is Daredevil and Sunday is Batman. Today, a pair of legends involving Wolverien's bizarre Australian accent in the Pryde of the X-Men and the story of why, exactly, Wolverine turned out not to be a mutated wolverine!

Let's begin!

NOTE: The column is on three pages, a page for each legend. There's a little "next" button on the top of the page and the bottom of the page to take you to the next page (and you can navigate between each page by just clicking on the little 1, 2 and 3 on the top and the bottom, as well).

COMIC LEGEND: A misreading of the script for Pryde of the X-Men resulted in Wolverine being turned Australian in the episode.

STATUS: False

Pryde of the X-Men was a pilot for a proposed X-Men series that came out in 1989 and was later released on home video.

While it did not end up being picked up for a series, it certainly appears to have played somewhat of a role in the X-Men eventually getting their own series a few years later which became very popular.

The most amusing aspect of the series by far is that Wolverine has an Australian accent in the episode, which is hilarious since Wolverine is famously Canadian - the guy was SPECIFICALLY invented to be a Canadian superhero!

One of the bad guys in the episode is Pyro, who actually IS Australian.

In the episode, Wolverine has a fight with another villain, the Toad, who Wolverine refers to as a "dingo."

A popular legend has popped up that states that it was this line that led to Wolverine becoming Australian. Here it is from one site (but it shows up a lot):

[Wolverine's Australian accent] was due to the actor and director misunderstanding a line in the script. Wolverine calls the Australian mutant Pyro "dingo", and rather than take that as an odd Australian slur, they assumed Wolverine to be Australian. Although in the episode he actually calls Toad a dingo.

As the story even goes, it doesn't make sense since he doesn't actually call Pyro a dingo. But I guess the idea is that at one point he DID?

Anyhow, that doesn't track because Wolverine actually debuted on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends in 1982!

And in the episode, the SAME ACCENT was used on Wolverine!

Neither Pyro nor Toad were in the 1982 episode. So in other words, it makes no sense that his accent was a "mistake" in Pryde of the X-Men when it is the same accent used seven years earlier. It just seems as though whoever the producers were liked the idea of having Wolverine use an Australian accent.

Thanks to John Diggins for correcting my initial error on the actor for Wolverine. Neil Ross played Wolverine on Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends but Ross then played Nightcrawler in Pryde of the X-Men and not Wolverine as I first thought. Patrick Pinney took over the Wolverine role.